ASSESSING THE COST AND IMPLEMENTATION OF HIGH QUALITY EARLY CARE AND EDUCATION (ACIHQECE)

Mathematica Inc., Princeton NJ

Investigators

Abstract

The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE) in the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), has contracted with Mathematica Policy Research to launch the Assessing the Implementation and Cost of High-Quality ECE (ECE-ICHQ) project. The goal of the project is to create a technically sound, feasible, and useful instrument that will provide consistent and systematic measures of the implementation and costs of quality to help fill the knowledge gap about the cost of providing and improving quality in ECE. The first phase of the project will develop this instrument through: (1) a literature review and conceptual framework that specifies the contextual and implementation factors that may contribute to the association between features of high quality ECE and the costs of operating programs of different quality, (2) consultations with a technical expert panel (TEP), and (3) a study of 72 centers conducted in three phases that will support development and iterative testing of implementation and cost measures. Stages two and three involve developing and testing the new measure and resources for training of administration of the measure. Research Questions and Project Objectives The project will examine the following questions to support the development of implementation and cost measures for ECE programs: ? What are the key components and features of high quality center-based ECE services? ? What are the key implementation factors necessary to deliver high quality center-based ECE services? ? What are the mechanisms through which features of high quality center-based ECE translate into costs? ? What factors directly contribute to increases or decreases in costs of providing high quality center-based ECE services? ? What is the relationship between features of quality center-based ECE services and costs? OPRE is particularly interested in the sources of variation between centers that share similar characteristics but get to quality by implementing and allocating resources to different types of activities (for example, one center may spend a high proportion of its labor hours providing staff mentoring and supervision while another invests in staff education). The Mathematica team will work with OPRE to address these questions through: (1) a literature review and conceptual framework that specifies the contextual and implementation factors that may contribute to the association between features of high quality ECE and the costs to operate programs of different quality, (2) consultations with a technical expert panel (TEP), and (3) a Multi-Case Study of 72 centers that will support development and iterative testing of implementation and cost measures. The unique contribution of the project will be its focus on documenting implementation by using an implementation science lens (parsing out context, implementation activities and inputs, implementation outputs, and the link to quality as an outcome of the implementation activities and outputs). The resulting measures will build on cost estimation tools in child care as well as cost study tools developed for other types of early childhood programs (including home visiting).